Executives build CEO-level influence before the title by replacing directives with questions. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, sees this pattern across every executive who makes the transition successfully. Theodore Krantz, CEO of interos.ai, spent nearly nine years at Data.ai – moving from president to CEO – before taking the helm at interos. Even that track record did not hand him cross-functional credibility. He had to earn it by changing how he showed up in every room outside his home domain.
Quick Answer
Executives build CEO-level influence before they hold the title by mapping informal power structures, speaking last in rooms outside their domain, and framing positions as observed patterns rather than directives. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, teaches that people who have no obligation to follow you will commit to a conclusion they reached themselves far sooner than one you hand to them. The executives who advance to the CEO seat are not the ones who assert expertise the loudest. They are the ones asking the best questions and earning the right to be heard before they ask for anything.
Why Directives Fail When You Lack Formal Authority
I have watched this play out with executives across every industry. When you cannot fire someone, you cannot force compliance. Issue an order to someone outside your reporting line and they will go quiet, say yes, and do nothing. Executive influence does not run on authority alone. You have to build it before you need it.
Mike Winterfield, Managing Partner at Active Impact, works with founders and leaders who do not report to him. His approach is consistent: lead with questions, not conclusions. “You have a much more informal ability to lead with people who don’t report to you,” he says. “I try to go in with just start with questions. It’s the founder that kind of become self-aware and they come to you and say, I’d like some help on this.”
When Mike advises a founder on a decision they have already committed to, he does not tell them to reverse course. He puts a probability in front of them. “I’m not telling you not to do it, but what I’m going to tell you is that 90% of our founders who’ve tried it, it hasn’t worked for them. And so, you know, you make an educated decision.”
Mike also learned the hard way what happens when you skip this approach. Early in his career as a junior sales manager, he tried to get his team to replicate his exact methods. He tried to make every rep sell the way he did. It did not work. “I would say that I failed at doing that in the early days,” he says. “What really opened up my opportunity was looking around the team and watching how some of the people who reported to me sold.”
Jim Dukhovny, CEO of Alef Aeronautics, runs a company where four founders split the board equally. No single person holds enough formal authority to dictate direction. He describes the reality plainly: “You cannot just say I want it or I’m expert in this or something like that. You have to convince others and without it you don’t move forward.” What looks like a governance flaw is actually a forcing function. Every major decision gets built through consensus because there is no other path forward.
Mapping Informal Power Before You Move
Every organization runs on two org charts. The first is printed. The second is invisible, and it is the one that actually governs what gets done. I advise every executive I work with to learn to read both before they make any significant move in a new environment.
Ross Andrew Meglathery, CEO of Integritek, entered a highly technical private-sector business after years in the public sector. He did not fake expertise he did not have. “You really do need to kind of sit, observe, and then take everything in before you make any bold decisions,” he says. “You also want to kind of look at how the dynamics work with the team itself to understand who are the people that maybe have influence and not necessarily title.”
Ross also made the move most executives resist: he admitted his knowledge gaps out loud. “I had to admit where I had gaps in knowledge and kind of take what I was good at and say, I might not have the technical knowledge here, but I understand how to operate within systems, frameworks, people.” Admitting the gap is not a vulnerability on the CEO career path. It is a credibility signal. It tells the room you are not going to bluff your way through conversations where people will see through it immediately.
He extends this point to the broader becoming-a-CEO challenge: “Some CEOs are really good at sales, but they’re not good at the finance aspect. If you’re not willing to admit that you have some sort of weak spots or if you’re not at least able to find somebody that can kind of support that angle for you, then that’s where you run into trouble.” The executives who build lasting executive influence are not the ones who win every room. They are the ones who know which rooms they need to win and who they need on their side before those rooms happen.
How Executives Show Up in Cross-Functional Rooms
The executive who speaks first in a room outside their domain almost always loses it. I have seen this play out enough times to call it a rule. Your finance team does not care about your sales instincts. Your product team will not defer to your operational shortcuts. Walk in leading with conclusions and you accelerate skepticism, not buy-in.
The first rule of c-suite collaboration outside your home domain: be the last person to speak. Ted Krantz, after years commanding a revenue function at Data.ai, describes the shift required when entering new departments. He moved away from what he calls the “command of the revenue cockpit.” Ted describes the specific shift – moving away from directing toward listening and gathering. “Coming from such command of kind of the revenue cockpit and top line,” he says, meant becoming “more open to listening and active learning information gathering, being last to speak as you’re ramping into the other functions.” When you arrive in a room you do not own, your job is to collect information, not deliver conclusions.
Ted also identifies what changes when you lack brand authority behind you. “When you don’t have that logo and you’re building a company, you’re coming at it from a radically different position of trying to earn the right to the CFO,” he says. “And so there’s much tighter focus and fidelity needed in terms of the outside in value proposition.” Without a recognizable name behind you, your listening and your question quality become your only currency in those rooms.
Bryan House, CEO of Elastic Path, operates from the same discipline at the organizational level. “I don’t want to put myself in the position of bottleneck for the organization where all the decisions roll through me,” he says. “I want them to come up organically, and I have influence over that, but I don’t necessarily want to be directive.” Bryan thinks about stakeholder alignment before he walks into any room. “How do you think cross-functionally? How do you think about who you need to be bought into the decision? Who do you need to be supportive? Where do you actually need the advocates for whatever direction you think the business needs to go.”
This is what I coach executives to build before the title comes: know who your advocates are before you need them. Have the one-on-one conversations before the group meeting. By the time you sit down in the room, you are confirming alignment, not trying to construct it. Executives who try to build alignment in the room have already lost the room.
The “Lead from the Trenches” vs. “Get Out of the Center” Contradiction
There is a genuine tension in how you physically and mentally position yourself to build cross-functional buy-in. I have seen strong executives on both sides of this, and both are right in different situations.
Steven Monterroso, CEO of ShareVault, believes the fastest path to company-wide buy-in is front-line presence. “I think there’s no better way to do that than to lead from the front lines, right? Lead from the trenches.” Steven adds a point that goes beyond revenue logic: “Not everybody is motivated and incentivized by revenue growth, right? They have other personal self-interest that you have to play into.” To lead across departments, you have to go into their world and understand what actually moves each group.
Mike Winterfield and Bryan House found the opposite held for them: staying at the center of every decision kills influence. Bryan avoided becoming an organizational bottleneck. Mike succeeded only after he stepped back from prescribing methods and started watching how his team naturally operated. Both men moved away from the center. Both built more influence as a result.
The way I resolve this with executives I work with: both approaches solve the same problem from different angles – getting out of your own frame so you can understand what other people need. Whether you do that by getting into their world or stepping back from the center of yours depends on the team, the relationship, and what the moment requires.
| Approach | What It Looks Like | What It Produces for the Executive |
| Lead from the Trenches (Monterroso) | Physically present in each department’s daily work; actively mapping what motivates each team | Buy-in from people who do not respond to revenue logic or top-down vision statements |
| Get Out of the Center (House, Winterfield) | Avoids becoming the decision bottleneck; shapes direction upstream before it reaches the group | Organic advocacy and a team that executes without constant direction from above |
In my experience, the executives who struggle most on the CEO career path are the ones who pick one approach and apply it everywhere. The ones who build lasting executive influence learn to shift between both depending on what the situation requires.
Unlearning the Expertise That Made You
The most consistent pattern I see among executives who build CEO-level influence before the title is this: they had to abandon the specific skill that originally made them successful. Every one of them had a superpower that earned them a senior title. Every one of them had to set it aside to build credibility outside their home domain.
Premal Shah, PhD, CEO of MyOme, built his early career on technical precision. The shift to scaling leader required a complete change in how he measured his own success. “Scaling isn’t about the elegance of the solution anymore. It’s about the clarity of direction, trust, and just being able to repeat that process over and over again.” He stopped asking whether he solved the problem. He started asking: “Did I build the conditions for others to solve this?”
I see this break executives who are otherwise exceptional. For those who built credibility by being the most capable person in the room, removing yourself from the center of the solution feels like failure. It is not. It is the transition that separates executives who plateau in senior leadership from those who step into the CEO seat.
Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO of Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, was aggressive and intentional about building influence long before she held any leadership title. While still a classroom teacher, she volunteered for every role that put her directly in front of senior administrators. “I would volunteer to be the teacher liaison where I was talking to the senior administrators about what the teachers needed. I would volunteer to be a teacher coach, right? So all the things that I could possibly do, a union representative.”
Her thinking about what CEO leadership actually demands changed across thirty years. “When I first started… I needed to be the person out front, the forerunner, the person who did all the things, made sure everything happened, the micromanager. Now, 30 years later, I now know leadership is not how much I can do, but it is how much I can get done with the use of my entire team.”
Karla also names what happens to executives who skip the influence-building work: “If you don’t understand the organization and you don’t understand the people, they’re never going to follow you, right? And so you’re gonna find yourself on a long journey by yourself.” Becoming a CEO requires you to build followership before you hold the authority to require it. The traits of successful CEOs are not the ones that made them exceptional individual contributors. They are the ones that make other people succeed.
FAQ
How can leaders build influence before becoming CEO?
The fastest path to CEO-level influence starts with volunteering for visibility before you need it. Glenn Gow coaches executives on the CEO career path to build cross-functional access before the title comes, not after it arrives. Dr. Karla Johnson, CEO of Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, built influence by taking on every role that put her directly in front of senior administrators while she was still a classroom teacher – teacher liaison, teacher coach, union representative. The approach is the same regardless of industry: identify the rooms you need to be in, find the roles that get you there, and show up consistently long before you ask for anything in return.
What behaviors build CEO-level credibility with people who have no obligation to follow you?
Glenn Gow identifies three behaviors that consistently separate executives who build cross-functional credibility from those who don’t. First, speak last in every room outside your domain – gather information before you offer conclusions. Second, admit your knowledge gaps before someone else identifies them. Third, frame your positions as patterns you have observed across similar situations rather than personal directives. Ross Andrew Meglathery, CEO of Integritek, built his cross-functional credibility by openly acknowledging his technical limitations while leaning on his ability to operate within people and systems. When you do all three consistently, people who have no obligation to follow you start choosing to.
What are the 3 C’s of influence?
Glenn Gow frames the three C’s of executive influence as Credibility, Curiosity, and Consensus. Credibility is earned in the work before you ask for anything – Bryan House, CEO of Elastic Path, describes it as the advantage held by the people with deep relationships who have earned their stripes by sitting on four-hour support calls, who know the pain points of your business and where your strategy is. Curiosity is the question-based approach that lets other people arrive at conclusions themselves rather than having conclusions handed to them. Consensus is built before you need it – by identifying your advocates in advance and ensuring the right people are already aligned before you ask them to move.
How much influence does a CEO have on a company?
A CEO’s influence is total in title and never automatic in practice. Glenn Gow’s consistent observation is that CEO influence scales with how much of it the CEO gives away. Jim Dukhovny, CEO of Alef Aeronautics, leads a company where four founders split the board equally. Even with the CEO title, he operates from one reality: every major decision at Alef requires full consensus because no single founder can move forward without the others. Leaders who avoid bottlenecking decisions and build advocates at every level carry far more organizational weight than those who demand compliance and call it leadership.
How do executives learn to manage up effectively?
Managing up requires the same approach as leading cross-functionally: lead with patterns and probabilities, not commands. Glenn Gow coaches executives to surface the data and then step back, letting senior leaders arrive at the recommendation themselves. Mike Winterfield, Managing Partner at Active Impact, leads using probability-based framing rather than directives – sharing what has and has not worked across similar situations so the decision-maker arrives at the right conclusion on their own terms. When communicating upward, your job is to make the picture as clear as possible and then get out of the way of the decision.
How do you communicate effectively with senior leaders?
Glenn Gow’s consistent guidance is to do the communication work before you enter the room. Senior leaders reject conclusions that feel imposed. They accept conclusions they feel they reached. Bryan House, CEO of Elastic Path, frames the pre-work every executive must complete before any senior conversation: understand who needs to be bought into the decision, who needs to be supportive, and where you actually need advocates for the direction you are proposing. By the time you sit down with a senior leader, the conversation should confirm alignment that already exists. Executives who try to persuade in the room have already lost ground.
What executive relationships matter most on the path to the CEO seat?
The relationships that matter most are with people who hold informal authority – influence without a title. Glenn Gow coaches executives to identify these individuals in the first 90 days at any new organization, because they are the ones who will either advocate for or quietly block any major initiative. Ross Andrew Meglathery, CEO of Integritek, names this as a first-priority behavior when entering any new environment: observe the team to identify who carries real influence regardless of what the org chart says. Building executive relationships with those people before you need them is the work most executives skip, and the absence of it shows up when it is too late to fix.
What does becoming a CEO require beyond functional expertise?
Becoming a CEO requires you to optimize for a completely different output than the one that made you successful as a senior leader. Glenn Gow sees this plateau consistently: the executives who stall are the ones who keep trying to be the most capable person in the room. The ones who advance are the ones who learn to create the conditions for others to succeed. Premal Shah, PhD, CEO of MyOme, rebuilt his entire approach to leadership – shifting from individual problem-solver to the person responsible for building the team’s ability to solve. The CEO skills that matter most are not technical depth. They are clarity of direction, the ability to earn voluntary commitment, and the discipline to speak last in rooms where you have the most experience.
How do you build executive influence in a new organization quickly?
Do not try to establish dominance in the first 90 days. Glenn Gow advises a listen-first approach: demonstrate that you make other people’s work better before you ask anyone to follow your direction. Premal Shah, PhD, CEO of MyOme, rebuilt his entire metric for success by shifting from whether he personally solved a problem to whether he built the conditions for others to solve it – and that shift produced more organizational trust than any individual contribution had. In a new organization, the fastest path to lasting executive influence is showing up as someone who makes the team stronger, not as the person with the best answer.
What separates CEO leadership styles that build cross-functional credibility from those that don’t?
The gap Glenn Gow sees most often is between executives who show up in cross-functional rooms to assert and those who show up to understand. Authority leaders walk in expecting their title or track record to carry them. Architecture leaders have already mapped the informal power structure, built the one-on-one relationships, and know who the advocates are before they enter the group setting. Steven Monterroso, CEO of ShareVault, identifies the root issue: in cross-functional rooms, not everyone responds to the same motivators as the leader driving the initiative. The CEO who knows what moves each department and shifts their approach accordingly builds the kind of credibility that holds under pressure.
What makes a great CEO when it comes to leading people who don’t report to them?
What makes a great CEO in this context is the ability to generate voluntary commitment from people who have no obligation to give it. Glenn Gow coaches executives that the traits of successful CEOs are almost never the ones that made them effective individual contributors. Premal Shah, PhD, CEO of MyOme, describes the practical shift: “When you’re by yourself, it’s putting in 30 hours a day, eight days a week, and you’re able to crank through things and push things through. When you’re managing even a team of four, you have to set the direction, let them go.” The executives who make that shift – measuring themselves by what their teams accomplish rather than what they personally solve – are the ones who build CEO-level credibility before the title arrives.
What does the CEO career path typically look like for executives promoted from within?
Glenn Gow coaches executives that the CEO career path rarely follows a straight line from functional expert to top seat. The most common pattern: executives spend years building deep credibility in one domain, then deliberately expand their cross-functional visibility before any formal promotion conversation begins. Ted Krantz, CEO of interos.ai, spent nearly nine years at Data.ai moving from president to CEO before taking the helm at interos – a trajectory that required building fresh cross-functional credibility at each transition, not just carrying prior credentials forward. The executives who advance fastest treat every cross-functional room as a credential-building opportunity long before a title change is on the table.
How do you build executive presence before you hold the CEO title?
Executive presence before the title is not about polish – it is about how you show up when no one is required to listen. Glenn Gow defines it as the ability to make a room feel that a decision is in good hands without holding formal authority over the outcome. Ross Andrew Meglathery, CEO of Integritek, built that presence by being the first person in the room to openly admit what he did not know – a posture that signaled he was operating from honesty rather than performance. The fastest way to build executive presence before the CEO seat is to stop managing how you are perceived and start demonstrating how you think in rooms that matter.
What You Do Next
If you are building toward the CEO seat or trying to create real cross-functional alignment in the role you hold now, the work starts with how you show up in the next room where you have no formal authority. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, works with executives who want to build influence that holds – without burning the relationships they will need when the title finally comes. If that is the conversation you need, book a direct session with Glenn and let’s get to work.
